Remarks on the passing of Mary Levy

Betsy Wolf

November 2024

 For those of you who didn’t know her, Mary Levy was DC’s #1 person when it came to DC school budgeting. She had more institutional knowledge than anyone, including city officials.  

I first met Mary Levy in 2018 when my child’s Title 1 school faced multiple staffing cuts for no particular reason. I was connected to her by others, and we went to lunch. Soon after, she sent me a lot of data that she had collected and worked on. It was her data that I used to make graphs showing how inequitable DCPS school funding was. I graphically represented the points Mary had been making for years.

Over the course of the past 6 years, we exchanged hundreds, if not thousands, of emails and attended meetings together. I developed a relationship with Mary over school budgets and other education advocacy issues. She became an advocacy friend, thought partner, and mentor.

Mary was very generous with her time and work. She would always answer my questions, at times with long and very detailed responses, and I know that I was not the only person asking her questions. She spent hours cleaning data, and she would always willingly share it with you. Researchers are often reluctant to share their data, but not Mary Levy. She wasn’t concerned about making a name for herself. She understood that the work was bigger than any one of us and that the work ultimately mattered for the students in DC. And that’s why she was doing it.

There’s a saying that goes like this: you never trust anyone’s data but your own. This is because there are so many decisions made in the data cleaning process that can influence the results. Mary used to say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” But Mary had painstaking attention to detail, she incorporated numerous checks to identify potential errors, and she was willing to show her work. She also once told me that she was willing to do an analysis as long as the outcome wasn’t predetermined. She had integrity in her work, and therefore, she couldn’t be bought or sold. I don’t trust a lot of people’s data, but I trusted Mary Levy’s.

Mary was very gracious and a big tent person. She was willing to sit down with anyone and have a conversation. Once I observed her explain to DCPS how she did her calculations to determine how many staff DCPS was cutting from individual schools. Because it wasn’t about her, she was always willing to bring others in.

She also wasn’t afraid to speak up if she knew something was wrong. One example of this was when she and Caryn Ernst resigned from the Cross-Sector Collaboration Task Force because, according to her, it failed to deal with the key questions relating to the task force’s basic mission and also excluded the voices of many stakeholders. Her independent work analyzing teacher and staff turnover in DCPS schools was also groundbreaking and showed abnormally high and concerning levels of teacher turnover. It also provided evidence against the status quo narrative and the talking points that are still being made today. Again, I trust Mary Levy.

Mary also taught me the importance of doing the work, even when it feels like you can’t win and that the work is taking time away from your children, on whose behalf you are advocating in the first place. She encouraged me saying that the work does matter, and that it’s important for your children to see you engaged in this work because it would be something that your children would carry on. 

So, let us go forth in the spirit of Mary Levy. Let us be generous with our time and work and bring others in who are willing to engage in good faith. Let us also be courageous to speak up when we know something is not right or is unjust, even if we are in the minority. Finally, let us carry on the work together because it does it matter, and it’s bigger than any one of us.

There won’t be a day in the DC school budgeting cycle when I don’t think about Mary Levy. You will be missed, and thank you, Mary.